This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Certain abbreviations that may be found in the description and/or in the Figures are herewith defined as follows:    3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership Project    BLER block error ratio    CCE control channel element    CQI channel quality indicator    CSI channel state information    DC dual connectivity    ACK acknowledgement    BSR buffer status report    DCI downlink control information    FTP file transfer protocol    HARQ hybrid automatic repeat request    HTTP hypertext transfer protocol    ICMP internet control message protocol    LTE long term evolution    MCS modulation and coding scheme    OLLA outer loop link adaptation    PDCCH physical downlink control channel    PDCP packet data convergence protocol    PPI power preference indicator    Rel-13 release 13    RRC radio resource control    RSRP reference signal received power    RSRQ reference signal received quality    RTT round trip time    SCell secondary cell    SDU service data unit    SR scheduling request    TCP transmission control protocol    TTI transmission time interval    UDP user datagram protocol    UE user equipment
TCP provides reliability, network adaptability, congestion control and flow control. Reliability is generally provided by using mechanisms such as sequence numbers to enable retransmission. Network adaptability and flow control are generally provided by using mechanisms such as windows or thresholds (e.g. congestion window size (cwnd), receiver window size (rwnd), slow start threshold (ssthresh)). For congestion control of TCP signaling a TCP congestion control mechanism is used to limit the amount of data that can be transmitted in a network.
A TCP congestion control mechanism functions to adjust the rate with which the protocol sends packets to the network using a congestion control window. A good congestion control mechanism can fully utilize the bandwidth while avoiding over-driving the network and thereby creating packet losses.
To avoid network congestion, a TCP sender always maintains a window (congestion window) such that the number of packets in flight do not exceed the receiver's ability to receive the packets. The function of a TCP congestion control mechanism is to perform TCP flow control by adjusting a flow rate with which the protocol sends packets to the network using a congestion control window.
The example embodiments of the invention work to improve control of congestion control mechanisms associated with TCP and/or any other communication protocol.